CINCINNATI - It happened again, that rare feeling of walking into a
place for the first time and taking an instant, intense liking to it.
The 3,600-seat Springer Auditorium is just one component of the great
Victorian pile of 4 million red bricks, known as the Music Hall, an
amazing building of gables, turrets, capricious angles, a style described
locally as Sauerbraten Byzantine.

Empty on this first view, except for some 300 singers and musicians on
the stage, the enormous auditorium looks like Albert Hall cut in half
lengthwise, and spruced up greatly: a sea of burgundy velvet seats
surrounded by gray and white, gold-trimmed, walls.

Music Hall went up in 1878.  That's old, for the US, but the May Festival,
for which it was built, is even older, ready to begin its 129th season
tonight.

That's why the stage is full - it's the last rehearsal before the opening,
James Conlon conducting Robert Porco's May Festival Chorus, William Henry
Caldwell's Central State University Chorus, and the Cincinnati Symphony.

Just off the flight from San Francisco, I am trying to figure out what is
being rehearsed.  I know the theme is "Beethoven, Bernstein, Brotherhood,"
and Beethoven is easily ruled out (although his "Birthday Cantata for
Prince Lobkowitz" will be new to me and many others), so it must be
Bernstein.

It's passionate and very loud music, with ultra-quiet, meltingly lyrical
passages in-between, a speaker declaiming, passion turning into excess
and bombast. . .

But no, it's not Bernstein, although his "Olympic Hymn," "Missa Brevis,"
portions of the Mass, and the "Kaddish" Symphony (with revised narration,
delivered by Jamie Bernstein Thomas) are also on the festival schedule.

The eminently Bernsteinesque piece, in fact, is Adolphus Hailstork's "Done
Made My Vow: A Ceremony," a huge, ambitious work, combining classical
melodic counterpoint, spirituals, chants, text from the Bible and Martin
Luther King's speeches.

Hailstork, 61, a music professor in Norfolk, VA, wrote the work in 1985,
for the 50th anniversary celebration of Norfolk State University.  "Done
Made My Vow" has been heard many times since, but Cincinnati is the
Westernmost boundary of its performance history.  Ask Hailstork why that
is, and he will tell you that he is "not pushing it," has no agent, press
representative, whatever it takes to get a work to new "markets." It's been
doing well just through word of mouth, Hailstork says, adding that he hopes
the work will get its West Coast premiere one of these days.

"Done Made My Vow," clearly, is an important component of the "Brotherhood"
theme, more locally specific than the centerpiece of tomorrow's festival
concert, Beethoven Ninth (with Bridgett Hooks, Kristine Jepson, Gary Lakes
and Richard Paul Finks).

The Cincinnati race riots (called here "urban unrest"), which took place
last year immediately before the May Festival, prompted Conlon to program
for this festival Beethoven and Bernstein with traditional and new
African-American works, such as Hailstork's "Ceremony," William Grant
Still's "In Memoriam," Jonathan Bruce Brown's "Legacy of Vision," and
spirituals.

Juxtaposed cleverly on the program this Sunday, in the Cathedral Basilica
of the Assumption: Beethoven's "Freundschaft ist die Quelle" and William
Dawson's arrangement of "Aint'-A That Good News!"

Among other soloists participating in the festival spanning two weekends:
Pamela Coburn, Florence Quivar, John Aler and Cynthia Haymon.

Janos Gereben/SF [In Cincinnati, to 5/21]
www.sfcv.org
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